PAST: Casa del Popolo

Six new paintings by British artist Nick Mead will be presented by May Andersen, inaugurating Casa del Popolo, a community exhbibition space established by Julian Schnabel on the ground floor of the Palazzo Chupi at 360 West 11th St.

“This is the first installment of a program to show the work of other artists and an opportunity to collaborate with people who present unique perspectives on art that I believe in. This is not an art gallery. I wanted to open part of my house to the public so they could have an art experience ‘far from the maddening crowd.’”

– Julian Schnabel, New York, 2013

THE CASE OF NICK MEAD by May Andersen

There is an inevitability, an eternity of paint constantly redefining itself in these paintings. The more you look at them the more they change. Black and brown painted marks that look like magic marker seem uncontrolled and deliberate at the same time, as if in one stroke, urban and ethnic this kind of graffiti, if you will, speaks its own language, louder, more personal and more complicated than words. Other inhabitants of these works, little clusters of thick paint far removed from the pastry chef’s tool that invented their eyeball look, and the stains of the fruit of the paint an oil residue, make up the middle space of this contemporary landscape where the legs of Velasquez’s horse once stood. Here is a quality of something you have never seen combined with a feeling of familiarity. These paintings do not vie to be accepted or try to be understood. In the figure of red covering what was once there, black and brown marks with their halos, you will find the multidimensional quality that is the topographical map of the painter’s mind. The world of these paintings changes radically when you look at them close up, like paintings should do. Like Velasquez does.